Leading entertainment software company accelerates sales and marketing decision-making to add millions to bottom line

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., September 15, 2008 -
Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced that Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company, has successfully implemented the Informatica data integration platform to help accelerate sales and marketing decision making and improve operational efficiency for competitive advantage. Integrating data across 22 key systems in three regions, the right-time data integration solution has enabled Electronic Arts to more tightly control inventories and accurately predict demand for its popular entertainment titles, resulting in millions of dollars in savings for the company

“The Informatica right-time data warehousing capabilities provide a framework for deriving information from data as soon as the data becomes available. The improved forecasting accuracy in the last year has delivered millions of dollars to the bottom line of Electronic Arts,” said Rajesh Gupta, data integration manager, Electronic Arts. “More accurate sales predictions have allowed the company to tightly control inventories thereby reducing markdown dollars, carrying costs, and waste while also ensuring better in-stock position at the shelf. With analyses and decisions around inventory management now based on near-real time data, we can be more agile and competitive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.”

Added Rajesh Gupta, “On top of this, from an IT standpoint, the use of Informatica has delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars savings in project costs, a 50% reduction in maintenance time and costs, and a 25% reduction in time-to-benefit for systems rolled out to new business areas.”

Forecasting the supply requirements and revenues of the North American retail channel, Electronic Arts’ demand planning function keeps a finger on the pulse of 90% of the company’s North American revenue stream. To deliver near-real time information for this and other tasks, Informatica PowerCenter provides the high-performance data integration underpinnings for the company’s operational data store (ODS), enterprise data warehouse and global financial reporting database. Acting as the hub for the numerous interfaces into and out of these systems, PowerCenter enables both the integration and delivery of data for analytics as well as the propagation of integrated data from the ODS to operational systems.

Ensuring best practices Informatica has also proved to be the ideal technology platform for Electronic Arts’ enterprise Integration Competency Center (ICC) approach to data integration and management. The company has built a compact team of in-house data integration experts around the platform and is able to approach each project with standard tools, best practices and shared skill sets to speed project time-to-benefit and ensure desired results. PowerCenter’s codeless development and extensive reusability of data transformations and mappings help reduce development costs and make it easy to add data sources and respond quickly to business change. Currently, more than 1,300 data mappings have been created within PowerCenter to consolidate data from almost two dozen dissimilar systems and applications.

Electronic Arts has already scaled its PowerCenter environment to keep ahead of growing data demands—demands largely brought on by the success of the overall initiative. It has also taken advantage of new PowerCenter performance upgrades to keep current with the state-of-the-art of data integration technology. The company now plans to implement the PowerCenter Grid option to further scale performance for peak demand periods and help ensure a high degree of availability now that the solution has become such a critical part of its business success.

“Whether you produce software or shoes, real-time intelligence based on timely, trusted data is vital to successfully managing today’s volatile demand chains and optimizing your presence in the retail channel,” said Girish Pancha, general manager Enterprise Data Integration, Informatica. “Importantly, what Electronic Arts and other leading manufacturers have accomplished with Informatica in the right-time decision making arena set the stage for further retail-focused initiatives including vendor managed inventory and price optimization—all aimed at distinguishing a supplier as one that can be counted on to deliver.”

About Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), headquartered in Redwood City, California, is the world's leading interactive entertainment software company. Founded in 1982, the Company develops, publishes, and distributes interactive software worldwide for video game systems, personal computers, cellular handsets and the Internet. Electronic Arts markets its products under four brand names: EA SPORTS™, EA™, EA SPORTS Freestyle™ and POGO™. In fiscal 2008, EA posted GAAP net revenue of $3.67 billion and had 27 titles that sold more than one million copies. EA's homepage and online game site is www.ea.com. More information about EA's products and full text of press releases can be found on the Internet at http://info.ea.com.

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is the leading independent provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 3,300 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of varying complexity and scale. For more information, call +1 650 385 5000 (1 800 653 9871 in the U.S.), or visit www.informatica.com.

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Note: Informatica and PowerCenter are registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.